SOA Software XML VPN Validated for IBM Tivoli -- ADTmag

SOA Software XML VPN Validated for IBM Tivoli

By ADT Staff
August 15, 2005

SOA Software said yesterday that IBM has validated SOA Software's XML VPN product as WS-Trust "Ready for IBM Tivoli Software." SOA Software XML VPN employs WS-Trust to integrate with IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager, allowing the enterprise to exchange secure B2B transactions sharing trusted, end-user identities, SOA says.

The primary business value is the ability to provide inter-partner trusted single-sign-on for Web services applications, SOA says. This means customers can register third-party identifiers with a trusted party (a bank or other financial services provider, for example), and can then use these identifiers to request services directly from the places they conduct business.

SOA Software is the first software vendor IBM has announced as part of its IBM Global Services SOA Management practice; the company is a partner in the SOA Websphere partner program. SOA Software's products are now Ready-for-Tivoli certified for Tivoli Access Manager, Tivoli Federated Identity Manager and Tivoli Enterprise Console.

The integration between TFIM and SOA Software's XML VPN is an interesting industry trend, SOA says. Because TFIM exposes standard Web services interfaces, this integration does not involve proprietary APIs or programming. This makes it much easier for TFIM to integrate with other policy-enforcement products and much easier for SOA Software to integrate with other policy-definition engines.

The combination of SOA Software's XML VPN and IBM's TFIM provides simple management of federated identities in a trusted model. For example, a user of a portal at one company can log on using an identifier specific to the portal. This portal can then invoke services from business partners’ portals that are able to map the original log-on identifier to their own internal identifier using TFIM to trust the originating company to authenticate the user. This essentially provides powerful trust-enabled single-sign-on for users between integrated applications at different companies, according to SOA.

SOA Software's XML VPN is available as software and as an appliance. Software starts at $5,000 per CPU. Appliances start from $50,000.